One of the horror genre's "most widely read critics" (Rue Morgue # 68), "an accomplished film journalist" (Comic Buyer's Guide #1535), and the award-winning author of Horror Films of the 1980s (2007), The Rock and Roll Film Encyclopedia (2007) and Horror Films of the 1970s (2002), John Kenneth Muir, presents his blog on film, television and nostalgia, named one of the Top 100 Film Studies Blog on the Net.

Friday, April 21, 2017

Cult-Movie Review: Night of the Lepus (1972)

The
horror cinema of the 1970s is filled with tales depicting Earth’s imminent
destruction at the hands (or paws...) of…animals.

But
make no mistake: while Mother Nature may launch her animal armies against us,
it is mankind himself that is to blame for her righteous vengeance By polluting natural environments, by dumping toxic wastes, and by using
pesticide, he has only brought upon his own destruction.

Message: it
is not nice to fool with Mother Nature.

The
Revenge of Nature Cycle may have started as the “when animals attack” genre, a movement exemplified by films such as Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963), or Willard
(1972). But by the mid-point of the
decade, filmmakers were almost constantly coupling vicious animal behavior with man’s massive and on-going mistreatment of the environment.

Accordingly,
polluting man battles amphibians in Frogs (1972). Pesticide-spraying man battles spiders in Kingdom
of the Spiders (1977). Toxic-waste dumping man faces insect rebellion in Empire of the Ants
(1977). Other films of the same ilk
including The Bug (1975), Squirm (1976), Day of the Animals
(1977), and perhaps the most infamous revenge of nature movie of all: Night
of the Lepus.

In
Night
of the Lepus -- a film derived from the satirical novel, The Year
of the Angry Rabbit (1964) by Russell Braddon -- the careless mistake of two
scientists results in the spread of a dangerous hormone that can cause “genetic deformity.” It becomes unloosed on the out-of-control giant rabbit population of Arizona. Before long, the ranchers and law enforcement
officials near Ajo are waging a war against giant carnivorous bunnies with
teeth the size of “saber tooth tigers.”

The guiding principle behind the movie, and indeed, behind the Revenge of Nature cycle is
sound, and not entirely new in the 1970s. Just as the original Godzilla (1954) is about
a monster that represents out-of-control atomic power -- the opening of Pandora's Box, so-to-speak, the bunnies represent
out-of-control science and irresponsible man tampering in God's domain, in Night of the Lepus. The big problem with the film is that as avatars of fear,
rabbits are rather un-intimidating creatures. Even with red paint splattered on their whiskery mouths.

Ants, spiders, worms, and even frogs seem more
appropriately terrifying. And Night of
the Lepus does itself no favors by showing the “enlarged” rabbits on screen
constantly with tiresomely repeat or stock footage. In fact, these giant rabbits hop around -- or rather
“stampede” -- across miniature sets in slow-motion, in full view of the camera for long, dull stretches of the running time,
and the result is underwhelming to say the least.

“Mommy,
what’s a control group?”

A
newscaster on TV hosts a special report about the “imbalance in the animal
world,” and a “plague of rabbits” infesting Australia. He then describes how the same situation is
bedeviling the residents of Arizona.

There,
rancher Cole Hillman (Rory Calhoun) is seeing his land overrun by
ever-multiplying rabbits.One day, his
favorite steed trips on a rabbit hole, breaks its leg, and must be put down, and that’s the
last straw. Cole asks a friend, Elgin
Clark (De Forest Kelley), to help him solve the crisis.

Elgin
contacts two scientists who work with animals, Roy (Stuart Whitman) and Gerry
Bennett (Janet Leigh). With their daughter
Amanda (Melanie Fullerton) alongside them, the scientists examine the problem
and begin to experiment with hormones in an attempt to suppress the mating
drive of the rabbits. The experiment doesn't work, and the scientists mix up a new concoction with results they can't predict, as they readily admit.

Unfortunately,
Amanda accidentally frees an affected rabbit, Romeo, from captivity, and the new hormone it carries causes
a mutant strain of giant rabbit to rapidly develop.

The
Bennetts, Elgin and Cole attempt to stop the onslaught of the rabbits, even
blowing up a mine-shaft where they have made their home. But a herd of giant carnivorous rabbits
escape from this trap, and make a run for Ajo, where they have the capacity to
do major damage in terms of life and property value.

“There’s
a herd of killer rabbit headed this way!”

You
may not realize it, but if you have watched The Matrix (1999), you have seen, at
least momentarily, imagery from Night of the Lepus.The movie plays on-screen during the scene in
which Neo (Keanu Reeves) visits the Oracle, and sees children bending
spoons. The subtle suggestion is that a
movie like Night of the Lepus -- about a “herd of killer rabbit” -- could only
exist in a weird facsimile of reality.

That’s
a good point, because Night of the Lepus is surely one of the most
unintentionally hilarious horror movies of its day, particularly with Amanda,
the Bennett’s little girl, asking exposition-heavy questions such as “Mommy,
what’s a control group?” or speaking for the audience and noting “I like
rabbits!"

Even
the humorless narrator of the “Rabbit War” news report at the film’s beginning adds to
the film's unintentional sense of humor by noting that these “cuddly pets” could become a
terrible “menace.”

As
a general rule, it’s a good idea not to refer to your monster as “cuddly,” because an
adjective like that undercuts the sense of horror. In a movie about slobbering, jumping, man-eating rabbits, the word cuddly should simply never be spoken at all.

Another
moment of funny dialogue comes from Whitman who worries “Heaven help us if any
of them [rabbits] get away before we know the effects of this serum.”

Guess
what happens in the very next scene?

If
you said that one of the affected rabbits gets loose, you are absolutely right. Amanda switches rabbits without her parents realizing it, and then the infected rabbit gets loose after Amanda keeps it as a pet for a time. The Bennets are not merely lousy scientists, they are lousy parents too, for taking Amanda to work with them and not paying attention to her actions. It's clear they recognize what dangers could await if a rabbit escapes.

Even
Janet Leigh, the great star of Psycho (1960) seems diminished by
the film’s ridiculous dialogue. When she comforts Amanda after a lepus attack she soothes her. It’s
gone,” she assures her daughter. “The rabbit is gone.”

Yes
dear, the cuddly pet rabbit is gone now, and you have nothing to fear. Again, this is a fear that should not be named, specifically. Even the very word, "rabbit," doesn't promote scares.

Let's be clear: Night
of the Lepus
features a monster that would be difficult to make scary under the absolute best of
circumstances, but the movie doesn’t create or promote the best of circumstances. Director William Claxton allows for the
rabbit scenes to linger on-creen -- in slow motion -- for long spells, and any illusion
that they are giant, or dangerous, is lost because of their familiarity. In fact, you get to the point where you start to recognize the rabbits. There's the black one, the orange one, and so forth.

And as
the friendly-seeming rabbits hop across miniature sets it is painfully obvious that they are not
gargantuan. The sound effects that
accompany their runs may “sound like a cattle stampede” to bystanders, but that too is kind of
funny.

I
should be clear, it’s not just that the shots linger beyond reason, in
agonizing slow-motion, it’s that they repeat.
A scene with rabbits leaping a chasm is seen at least twice, and many
scenes of the rabbits traversing a highway seem to repeat as well. Either that
or are the roads are so similar as to be visually indistinguishable.

Director
William Claxton -- a talent who directed several outstanding episodes of The
Twilight Zone (1959 -1965) including the sensitive “I Sing the Body
Electric” -- seems to approach this horror film as more of a Western, right down to Hill’s motivation for fighting the
rabbits (the death of a horse), and some attractive, even picturesque landscape
shots. The rabbits are treated more as a
stampede of out-of-control animals than as a threat resulting from
science-run-amok, and nature’s reprisal.

Now,
on one hand, treating the film’s threat as fairly realistic could be a good
thing…if the monsters inspired fear. But on the other hand, Claxton goes way
over-the-top in terms of fake-looking gore, a step which moves the film out of
the zone of realism. The scene vacillates between deadly dull conversations and over-the-top moments of ridiculous violence, and the approach is not pleasing.

As
one might expect from this approach, critics weren’t terribly impressed with
the results of Claxton’s efforts. Roger
Greenspun, writing in The New York Times,
noted the “technical laziness,” “stupid story” and “dumb direction,” a kind of
trifecta of utter terrible-ness. Alan
Frank, in 1982, treated the film more gently, though drew the same conclusion,
noting that the “enlarged rabbits” don’t “really carry a genuine monstrous
charge.”

Watching the film again for the first time since I wrote Horror Films of
the 1970's I felt a little bad for the out-dated wonders of Night of the Lepus. The movie features a lot of likable performers in it -- it’s
great to see De Forest Kelley again, for instance -- and it surely capitalizes on the
eco-terror Zeitgeist of its moment. And
yet beyond that, this is a horror film unable to enunciate even a single moment
of authentic horror.

Almost
funnier than the movie itself is the trailer, which discusses a “night of total terror” and a “devil creature.” It asks “what
happened the night science made its greatest mistake?”

5 comments:

John, accurate review. I watched this again last week when it was on TCM, I believe. I was glad to see De Forest Kelley too, just three years after Star Trek:TOS ended. There was a scene with rabbits hopping together down a dirt road. The problem is it was a close-up and you could see the tire tracks were in the dirt proving the rabbits were normal size.

I've long stated that this film is so wrong that it's right. What a wonderfully misguided motion picture. And for it to be cast with major actors is just the icing on the cake. Looking back, it's a amazing this thing got made. Let's face it, the FX tech of the time was certainly not up to making bunny rabbits look scary. And look closely at it's DVD release, in the corner of the picture you can see more than a few instances of the rabbit wranglers making it onscreen, in slow motion no less. When you hear tales of movies that got cancelled midway through production or were supposedly so bad that they never got released, it makes one wonder what the studio head meetings concerning Lepus must have looked like. My only complaint of course is the fact that, let's face it, more than a few rabbits were harmed, more than likely killed in the making of the film. And honestly, I always felt the little girl who caused the whole mess should have been tossed to the horde. All in all, a wonderful example of "well, it seemed like a good idea at the time" film making.

I have a perverse affection for this film. I married a dedicated non-genre film fan, and he thinks this is one of the funniest movies I ever made him sit through. To this day (27+ years together later), he still talks about the time I made him watch Attack of the Killer Bunnies.....

There was a movie night at a local hangout that showed a rapper slasher movie, "Holla if you Hear Me." We were so unimpressed, we shut it off halfway through. I suggested, "You want me to run home and get the rabbit movie?" It was more well received. We at least had fun riffing it.

what is surprising is that it's 1972 & the filmmakers still had ants & spiders to choose from. scary rabbits are a hard horror sell, no doubt, however i've seen a film with very menacing sheep, it can be done

About John

award-winning author of 27 books including Horror Films FAQ (2013), Horror Films of the 1990s (2011), Horror Films of the 1980s (2007), TV Year (2007), The Rock and Roll Film Encyclopedia (2007), Mercy in Her Eyes: The Films of Mira Nair (2006),, Best in Show: The Films of Christopher Guest and Company (2004), The Unseen Force: The Films of Sam Raimi (2004), An Askew View: The Films of Kevin Smith (2002), The Encyclopedia of Superheroes on Film & Television (2004), Exploring Space:1999 (1997), An Analytical Guide to TV's Battlestar Galactica (1998), Terror Television (2001), Space:1999 - The Forsaken (2003) and Horror Films of the 1970s (2002).

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